Free Republic

The Pilgrim Looks at Presbyterians and Pentecostals Several years ago, I decided I would read all the novels of Walker Percy and his boyhood friend, Shelby Foote. I completed the last Percy novel, The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), on July 15, 2006, (for some reason I write the date of completion on the last page of books I read).     Recently I read Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy which brought to mind an excerpt from Percy which D.G. Hart posted on The Old Life Theological Society (http://oldlife.org/). The title of the last novel is, as biographer,...

Today's column is drawn from Paul Greenberg's remarks October 27 accepting the Human Life Foundation's annual Great Defender of Life award: Life is just full of surprises. What's an old boy from Shreveport, La., doing talking at the Union League club in New York City? In a hall adorned with portraits of Mr. Lincoln and members of his cabinet during The War. Our newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has got to be one of the few left in the country, if not the only one, that still devotes a full editorial page every January 19 to celebrating the birth of Robert...

Saint Austin Review. 2003. In the summer of 1995, my wife and I––both Evangelical Protestants–-took a trip with the Catholic novelist Walker Percy. He had died in 1990, but his presence was very much evident in Signposts In A Strange Land (Noonday Press, 1991, 1992), a posthumous collection of essays and interviews we took along with us and read to one another as we drove from the Pacific Northwest up into Canada on a weeklong vacation. The title was fitting––not because of the scenery along the highways, but because at the time we found ourselves in a strange land between...